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As ISIS brewed in Iraq, Clinton’s State Dep't cut eyes and ears on the ground

A week before the last U.S. soldiers left his country in December
2011, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki traveled to Washington to
meet the team that would help shape Iraq’s future once the troops and
tanks were gone.

Over dinner at the Blair House, guest quarters for elite White House
visitors since the 1940s, the dour Iraqi sipped tea while Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke of how her department’s civilian
experts could help Iraqis avoid a return to terrorism and sectarian
bloodshed.

Iraq would see a “robust civilian presence,” Clinton told
reporters afterward, summing up the Obama administration’s pledges to
Maliki. “We are working to achieve that,” she said.

Less than three years later, the relatively calm Iraq that Maliki had
led in 2011 was gone. The country’s government was in crisis, its
U.S.-trained army humiliated, and a third of its territory overrun by
fighters from the Islamic State. Meanwhile, State Department programs
aimed at helping Iraqis prevent such an outcome had been slashed or
curtailed, and some had never materialized at all.

Clinton’s political foes would later seek to blame her, together with
President Obama, for the Islamic State’s stunning takeover of western
Iraq, saying the State Department failed to preserve fragile security
gains achieved at great cost by U.S. troops. In a speech Monday on how
he would deal with terrorist threats, Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump said, “The rise of ISIS is the direct result of policy
decisions made by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton.”

But an intensive review of the record during Clinton’s tenure
presents a broader picture of missteps and miscalculations by multiple
actors — including her State Department as well as the Maliki
government, the White House and Congress — that left Iraqi security
forces weakened and vulnerable to the Islamic State’s 2014 surge.

Documents and interviews point to ambitious plans by State Department
officials to take control of dozens of military-run programs in Iraq,
from training assistance for Iraqi police to new intelligence-collection
outposts in Mosul and other key Iraqi cities. But the State Department
scrapped or truncated many of the plans, sometimes at the behest of a
skeptical Congress and other times on orders from the White House, which
balked at the high costs and potential risks of U.S. civilians being
killed or kidnapped. Still other efforts were thwarted by a Maliki
government that viewed many of the programs as an unwelcome intrusion in
Iraqi affairs.

Senior State Department leaders were at fault as well, according to
documents and interviews with officials who helped manage Iraqi aid
programs after the withdrawal. By early 2012, pressed by the White House
to reduce the U.S. civilian footprint in Iraq, the department had begun
implementing sweeping, across-the-board cuts that extended to security
and counterterrorism initiatives once considered crucial for Iraq’s
stability after the withdrawal of U.S. troops, a joint investigation by
ProPublica and The Washington Post found.

Clinton, a member of the administration’s national security team at
the time, argued at first in favor of many programs that the State
Department eventually cut, according to current and former U.S.
officials familiar with internal White House deliberations. For the
Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. policy misadventures in Iraq, from
the initial invasion and occupation to the disasters after the U.S.
troop withdrawal, have persistently undermined Clinton’s efforts to tout
her extensive record in foreign policy. Candidate Clinton has
frequently pushed for more assertive engagement with Iraq’s military and
tribal alliances to help repel the Islamic State, essentially arguing
for an expansion of programs that were curtailed on her watch after the
U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011.

A State Department team that administered the cuts under White House
direction eventually ended up with a $1.6 billion surplus — money
initially appropriated for Iraq that was freed for use in other conflict
zones, including Libya, officials and documents say.

The downscaling was done over the objections of U.S. military leaders
on the ground, who said the slashing of key assistance programs — in a
few cases, by more than 90 percent — left the U.S. government
increasingly in the dark about developments outside the Iraqi capital.
Some former officers who managed Iraqi aid programs say the cuts were a
factor in the slow deterioration of Iraq’s security forces in the months
before the Islamic State’s 2014 assault.

“Our job was to prevent this from happening,” said retired Rear Adm.
Edward Winters, a former Navy SEAL and deputy director of the Office of
Security Cooperation in Iraq, a Pentagon organization overseen by the
State Department that managed the bilateral security relationship.

“We felt the capability to do that was being taken away.”

'A strategic vacuum'

Current and former Obama administration officials, including some who
sparred with the State Department over Iraq policy, defend Clinton as
one of the most vocal advocates for a muscular U.S. presence in Iraq
after the withdrawal deadline. Clinton argued publicly and privately for
keeping a contingent of U.S. troops in Iraq after Dec. 31, 2011, and
when that effort failed, she lobbied the White House and Congress for
money to fund civilian-run security programs in Iraq, her former aides
said. In written memos and in meetings as part of the president’s
national security team, she questioned Maliki’s ability to keep the
country united and warned that instability could lead to a resurgence of
al-Qaida in Iraq, or AQI, the terrorist group that later renamed itself
the Islamic State, the officials said.

“She was seized with this,” recalled Deputy Secretary of State Antony
J. Blinken, who was national security adviser to Vice President Biden
and then deputy national security adviser to President Obama during key
discussions about Iraq policy. “She recognized that AQI was down but not
out, and pressed the Iraqis, and us, to keep taking the fight to them.”

But, in scaling back civilian assistance to Iraq, Clinton’s aides cut
aggressively and sometimes unwisely, internal auditors later concluded.
The reductions met cost-cutting goals but did not “fully consider U.S.
foreign policy priorities in Iraq,” an internal review by the State
Department’s inspector general said. Some of the cuts were not fully
implemented until after Clinton’s departure in early 2013, though the
plans were largely in place, former aides said. The report is silent on
Clinton’s role in the reductions, or views about them.

“There was a period of time after the transition from the
military-led mission to a civilian-led mission when strategic decisions
were not made, with one official calling the period ‘a strategic
vacuum,’“ the inspector general’s office said in its 2013 report, citing
interviews with department officials in Washington and Iraq. It said
the cuts were driven by “Congressional and White House concerns that the
Department quickly reduce costs and security vulnerabilities and
address [the Iraqi government’s] desire for a more normalized U.S.
diplomatic presence.”

Among the casualties was a U.S. Army-run Iraqi tribal reconciliation
program with a record of successfully resolving disputes between Iraq’s
querulous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions. Animosity between Sunni
tribes and Maliki’s Shiite-led government would become a key factor in
the Islamic State’s takeover of Iraq’s Sunni heartland in 2014.

Asked to account for such cuts, a State Department spokesman said in
an email that diplomats lacked “the personnel or financial resources” to
continue many of the programs begun by the Pentagon during an era when
tens of thousands of U.S. troops were serving in Iraq. In any event, the
result was “lost trust with the Sunni community” and the abandoning of
an important window into what was really happening inside Iraq, said
retired Army Col. Rick Welch, who oversaw the program before the
military withdrawal,

“No one from the State Department ever contacted me,” Welch said in
an interview. Eventually the Baghdad-based reconciliation effort was
scaled back “to a trickle,” he said, “and then nothing else happened.”

'It was the resident’s directive'

In the first weeks of his presidency, President Obama flew to Camp
Lejeune, the sprawling Marine base in North Carolina, to repeat a
promise made throughout his election campaign: a pledge to wind down
America’s wars in the Middle East. He told the troops that “the war in
Iraq will end” through a responsible drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq by
Dec. 31, 2011, the deadline set three years earlier by the George W.
Bush administration.

In reality, few within Obama’s own administration expected that the
entire U.S. contingent would exit Iraq by that date, current and former
aides say. In interviews, State Department and Pentagon officials said
they were convinced that Iraq would ultimately negotiate an agreement to
leave a modest contingent of U.S. soldiers — perhaps 10,000 or so — in
the country to ensure stability and serve as a bulwark against a
resurgence of al-Qaida in Iraq.

The presence of even a small American force would have provided a
substantial benefit for U.S. diplomats in Iraq after 2011, assuring that
the Pentagon would continue to take the lead in U.S.-Iraqi military
liaison programs while also helping with mundane but necessary functions
such as security, medical care, food service and transportation on the
ground and in the air.

But with a deadline looming and no firm decision from the White
House, the State Department began to develop plans for hiring thousands
of contractors to perform the same services at higher costs. The
uncertainty lingered until October 2011, when the talks collapsed just
10 weeks before the deadline for pulling all U.S. forces out of the
country.

Throughout this period, Clinton continued to campaign for what
several aides called a “robust” mission for American diplomats in Iraq,
preferably backed by a significant U.S. troop garrison. Her advocacy was
recalled by numerous military and intelligence officials who
participated in classified discussions on Iraq. It was also expressed
publicly in news conferences and congressional testimony at the time.

“She was very focused on how to apply the full weight of the U.S.
government to locking down that residual troop presence,” said Jake
Sullivan, the State Department’s director of policy and planning who
later became the top foreign policy adviser to the Clinton campaign. As
prospects for U.S. troop garrisons began to dim, Clinton “insisted on a
robust contingency planning process, to leave nothing to chance on how
we protected our civilian presence and how we made sure that we were
supporting the outlying posts beyond Baghdad,” Sullivan said.

State Department officials initially planned for taking control of
more than a third of the 1,300 programs and missions run by the Pentagon
in Iraq. That alone, as Clinton herself would acknowledge, constituted
the “largest transition from military to civilian leadership since the
Marshall Plan,” the extensive U.S. aid effort after World War II.

Contingency plans created in 2010 envisioned taking over key security
missions, such as the tribal reconciliation program. Another initiative
called for building new diplomatic and intelligence outposts around the
country to give the United States a presence in cities that once hosted
American military bases. These facilities, called “Enduring Presence
Posts,” or EPPs, were initially planned for five Iraqi locales: Irbil,
Diyala province, Kirkuk, Basra and Mosul.

State Department officials urged Congress to approve funding for the
EPPs, saying the listening posts would help “mitigate ethno-sectarian
conflict” while allowing the security officials to better “forecast,
prevent or contain instability outside of Baghdad.”

“Spotting emerging problems early is going to be critical,” Clinton’s
aides wrote in a 2010 staff report to lawmakers. The report raised
concerns about the department’s ability to carry out some of its new
mandates without U.S. military support, but it urged congressional
appropriators to put up the necessary financial backing.

In Washington, both the White House and Congress viewed the plans
with deepening skepticism. At a March 2011 Senate Appropriations
Committee hearing, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) appeared to scoff at
the idea of a civilian force of diplomats and contractors “trying to do
business in Iraq all over the place with no troops.

“That is basically a private army replacing the American military,”
Graham said to Clinton. “So I’d like us to think long and hard as a
nation — does that make sense?”

The cost of building, equipping and securing diplomatic enclaves in
Iraqi cities such as Mosul — a hotbed of Sunni terrorism in 2011 —
struck senior Obama aides in the meetings as exorbitantly expensive and
impractical, even more so because of Maliki’s growing antipathy toward
U.S. interference in Iraq’s domestic affairs, according to current and
former aides who participated in the private discussions.

The loss of a U.S. troop presence meant the closing of all U.S.
military installations, including dozens of Provincial Reconstruction
Teams, the smaller regional units from which U.S. military and civilian
workers administered aid to local towns and tribes. Unable to rely on
Iraqi help, State Department officials would have to hire an army of
contractors to replicate the functions and services previously provided
by the Pentagon. For U.S. diplomats, a routine journey along the 40-mile
highway from Baghdad to Baqubah would now be a complicated and
dangerous affair in which assassination or kidnapping would be a
constant threat.

The decision to scale back plans for the post–2011 civilian mission
was made by Biden and a faction of White House officials that included
staff members of Obama’s National Security Council, who were given
primary responsibility for managing relations with Iraq, according to
accounts from current and former U.S. officials who participated. A team
led by State Department Deputy Secretary Thomas R. Nides was put in
charge of reviewing and implementing the reductions, with support from
State Department officials in Washington and Baghdad. Clinton, having
lost the argument for a larger force, was briefed about the developments
but left it to her subordinates to decide how the cuts would be
implemented, several former and current administration officials said.

Biden’s office declined to comment on the reductions, though former
aides said the cuts reflected the prevailing view at the White House and
on Capitol Hill: that a large civilian force in Iraq would not be
sustainable once U.S. troops were gone.

“The president made the decisions on the military drawdown, and it
was the president’s directive that we were all executing,” Nides said.
“On the civilian side, the White House’s big worry was the security of
our people. Once the decision was made that we weren’t going to have the
authority to keep our military there — and even before it was made — we
knew we not only couldn’t afford to keep growing, but we had to reduce.
At one point, we had the biggest civilian footprint in the world.”

Administration officials insisted that a smaller, civilian-led force
could continue to provide critical support for Iraq’s transition, but
the cuts were demoralizing to State Department and Pentagon officials
who saw prized aid programs shrink or disappear. State Department
officials tried to persuade other agencies, including the CIA, to split
the costs of operating posts in Mosul and other provincial cities, but
that idea withered as well.

“The robust presence we envisioned did not survive,” recalled a
former State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity
to describe private White House deliberations about Iraqi policy.
“Things kept getting whittled down. We’d come back from each meeting
with bad news about the latest thing to get scrapped.”

A slow-motion nightmare

Meanwhile, other programs intended to help Iraqis battle terrorism were facing a quiet death.

On Jan. 1, 2012, the first day after the U.S. troop era officially
ended, 157 American military service personnel remained in Iraq as part
of the State Department-run Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq.
Pentagon and State Department officials sought and won authorization to
expand the number by nearly twofold, from 157 to about 300, to be backed
by a supporting cast of thousands of contract workers, according to
documents and former officials.

Pentagon budget documents in early 2012 called the unit vital to
counterterrorism efforts, facilitating the sharing of intelligence
between military and civilian agencies in both the United States and
Iraq. Among other missions, it provided support for Iraq’s elite
terrorism-fighting unit, known as the Counter Terrorism Service.

But the program began shrinking almost immediately after the troop withdrawal, former Pentagon officials remembered.

“It started going away,” remembered Winters, the former deputy director.

A 2013 report by the Pentagon’s inspector general said the cuts
amounted to unilaterally slashing such programs to meet budget goals.
The department implemented a “primarily top-down directed initiative in
which cuts were made based on percentages and targets across assigned
agencies without sufficient consideration of their differing missions
and resources requirements,” the report said.

An early casualty was direct U.S. support for Iraq’s Counter
Terrorism Service. The number of embedded U.S. advisers to the elite
terrorist-fighting unit dropped from more than 100 before the military
withdrawal to just two, according to Winters and other former Pentagon
officials who served in Iraq.

Another key Pentagon program that helped the U.S. government collect
and analyze intelligence about terrorist activities was scrapped.
Charles Bova, who ran the program, said the scuttling of the project
resulted in the loss of an important window into Iraq that could have
provided Americans and Iraqis with “a better awareness of what al-Qaida
in Iraq was up to.”

A training facility in Kirkuk was shuttered, not only because of
budget cuts but also because of resistance from Maliki’s Shiite-led
government, which had begun to push back against U.S. assistance
programs in predominantly Sunni and Kurdish provinces. Immediately after
the U.S. troop departure, Maliki began ordering the arrests of rival
Sunni politicians while replacing U.S.-trained Iraqi generals with
Shiite allies personally loyal to the prime minister. Some of the same
Maliki appointees would later abandon their divisions as the Islamic
State began its assault on Mosul.

Sunni protests against Maliki erupted in 2012 and, almost in tandem,
the number of suicide bombings in Iraq started to rise. The terrorist
predecessors of the Islamic State began gaining strength across Iraq,
aided by the worsening sectarian tensions as well as the fighting next
door in Syria, where the civil war gave jihadist leaders a cause and a
safe haven in which to rebuild.

“None of us thought the problem was gone — we thought we were leaving
a void there,” Winters said. “We all expected that [al-Qaida in Iraq]
would come back and get worse. But we didn’t think it would happen that
fast.”

Worried that Iraqi security was unraveling, Clinton and other senior
Obama advisers quietly lobbied Iraqi leaders to accept new forms of
assistance unfettered by State Department legal and budgetary
constraints. Beginning in late 2011, Clinton joined then-CIA Director
David H. Petraeus and other White House officials in seeking to persuade
Maliki to host a joint U.S.-Iraqi “fusion cell,” consisting of
intelligence experts and Special Operations forces from both countries,
according to officials who participated in the talks. The White House
also offered Maliki non-lethal surveillance drones to help track the
movement of suspected terrorists, the officials said.

The Iraqis appeared open to both ideas but made no move to implement
them. The possibility of U.S.-supplied drones in Iraq was nixed by
Maliki after news of the offer leaked to the media. Both programs were
eventually implemented, but only after waves of Islamic State suicide
bombings began to threaten security in Baghdad.

“It was like one of those slow-motion nightmares,” said Blinken, the
State Department official. “We were moving our own system, trying to
move Congress, trying to move the Iraqis. We saw this thing coming, we
were acting on it, but the problem outran the solution we were putting
into place.”

The budget cuts did achieve one positive, and perhaps unexpected,
result: a budget surplus. By May 2012, the State Department was sitting
on $1.6 billion in funds that Congress had appropriated for Iraq, but
which the department no longer intended to use there. Department
officials had the option of redirecting those funds, and did so,
shifting some of the money to other conflict zones, including Libya,
according to public documents and former officials.

A large chunk of leftover cash was initially earmarked for the
construction of a new diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, the restive Libyan
city which Clinton had planned to visit in late 2012. That idea
abruptly ended after the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, assaults on the Benghazi
compounds that left four Americans dead.

Prized targets

On June 4, 2014, the Islamic State, in a quick strike, captured
Mosul. The black-flagged terrorists blew past Iraqi army defenders,
aided in many cases by Sunni tribesmen who saw the jihadists as
preferable to Maliki’s Shiite-led government.

Whether the additional security assistance could have helped prevent
the collapse of Iraq’s security services is impossible to say with
certainty. Many current and former administration officials, including
some who strongly favored a residual U.S. troop presence, argue that
Maliki’s inept management of the military and repression of the
country’s Sunni minority inalterably weakened the country and made it
vulnerable to collapse. If a few hundred Americans had been stationed in
Mosul in 2014, these officials say, they might have become prized
targets for the terrorist army that overran the city that summer.

“People have an illusion here,” said Nides, the former State
Department deputy secretary. “From a practical perspective, what you
actually get is 20 people with a big security footprint. Are they going
to be getting in their cars and driving around talking to tribal
leaders? I don’t think so.”

In any case, the Islamic State’s takeover prompted a rush by the
Obama administration to restore military-led security assistance
programs that had been quietly curtailed after the military drawdown.
Within weeks, 475 U.S. troops were sent to advise Iraqi security forces.
Today, the level is more than 10 times that. The concern over tight
budgets has faded as well: Congress has appropriated billions of dollars
to deal with the jihadist threat.

Clinton, the presidential candidate, responded to the crisis as well,
putting forward a detailed plan for defeating the Islamic State. She
has primarily blamed Maliki, the former Iraqi leader and her former
partner during the transition, for the resurgence of the Sunni
terrorists. Some of her proposed solutions have called for improving
tribal liaisons and intelligence collection programs that were cut or
abandoned three years earlier.

“We’ve got to do a better job of getting back the Sunnis on the ground,” she told ABC News in an interview in 2015.

Clinton has stressed her experience and track record in the national
security arena as a key selling point on the campaign trail, echoing
themes from her memoir, “Hard Choices,” which chronicled her experiences
as secretary of state. The book came out a few weeks after Mosul fell
to the Islamic State.

The book made news upon publication because of Clinton’s admission
that it was a “mistake” to have voted in 2002 to support the U.S.
invasion of Iraq the following year.

On the rest of what happened in Iraq during her tenure as America’s top diplomat, the 635-page book is silent.

This story was co-published with The Washington Post.

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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton holds a press availability with His Excellency Nouri al-Maliki, Prime Minister of the Republic of Iraq at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. on July 24, 2009.

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